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5 months ago
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One of the year’s most anticipated films will be on sale for independent buyers at the upcoming Cannes market with news that French sales company Goodfellas has boarded Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis ahead of the movie’s world premiere in Competition at the festival.
Speculation has been rife around rollout plans for the $120M self-financed epic ever since Coppola showed it for the first time to buyers at L.A.’s Universal CityWalk Imax Theater at the end of March, with the screening followed shortly after by news of its Cannes selection.
Adam Driver stars as an idealistic architect attempting to rebuild New York as an American Utopia, with the ensemble cast also featuring Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voigt, Laurence Fishburne and Kathryn Hunter. Above is a first look image from the movie.
As per Mike’s report on the L.A. screening, Coppola and longtime attorney Barry Hirsch, who is a producer the film, have been looking for a distribution strategy that will reach a wide audience in the fall, with an emphasis on Imax theatres. The U.S. deal remains a work in progress. CAA Media Finance is across this project too.
The deal with Goodfellas and the now finalized sale of French rights to Le Pacte means the film will meet with a Cannes rule that Competition films must release theatrically in France before hitting any platform.
This rules out the immediate involvement of a streamer in France due to the territory’s windowing rules requiring a 17-month gap between a theatrical release and its launch on a global streamer, apart from Netflix which has negotiated a 15-month deal.
It remains to be seen whether the movie goes the streaming route elsewhere, although Deadline hears Goodfellas is also already close to securing theatrical deals in a number of key territories.
Paris-based Goodfellas (ex Wild Bunch International) has a long track record of audacious sales campaigns at Cannes.
Over its 20-year run, Vincent Maraval’s firm has sold 11 Palme d’Or winners including Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11, Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is The Warmest Colour, Hirokazu Kor-eda’s Shoplifters and Julia Ducournau’s Titane, while it has helped a raft of Cannes titles breakout internationally including Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum and Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables. The company’s Oscar-winning sales titles include Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist, Luc Jacquet’s March of the Penguins and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.
This will not be the first time Coppola has teamed up with a French company on a landmark production. In 1977, late French producer Paul Rassam invested in Apocalypse Now when it was in financial difficulty in return for the French rights to the film.
The deal resulted in a life-long friendship between Coppola and Rassam and members of the latter’s extended family including late producer Claude Berri and his son Thomas Langmann.
